CEC 2016 Special Session

Theoretical Foundations of Bio-inspired Computation

News

Extended submission deadline: 31 January 2016

Motivation

Bio-inspired search heuristics often turn out to be highly successful for optimization in practice. The theory of these randomized search heuristics explains the success or the failure of these methods in practical applications. Theoretical analyses lead to the understanding of which problems are optimized (or approximated) efficiently by a given algorithm and which are not.

The benefits of theoretical understanding for practitioners are threefold.

Aiding the algorithm design,

guiding the choice of the best algorithm for the problem at hand,

determining the optimal parameter settings.

The theory of evolutionary computation has grown rapidly in recent years. The primary aim of this special session is to bring together people working on theoretical aspects of bio-inspired computation. The latest breakthroughs in the theory of bio-inspired computation will be reported and new directions will be set.

Scope

Potential authors are invited to submit papers describing original contributions to foundations of evolutionary computation. Although we are most interested in theoretical foundations, computational studies of a foundational nature are also welcome.

The scope of this special session includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:

Theoretical foundations of bio-inspired heuristics

Exact and approximation runtime analysis

Black box complexity

Self-adaptation

Population dynamics

Fitness landscape and problem difficulty analysis

No free lunch theorems

Statistical approaches for understanding the behaviour of bio-inspired heuristics

Algorithm Engineering

Our research focus is on theoretical computer science and algorithm engineering. We are equally interested in the mathematical foundations of algorithms and developing efficient algorithms in practice. A special focus is on random structures and methods.